Aesthetics of existence in flux: taoist corporeality and contemporary world

Abstract

Contemporary macro-sociological analysis have associated the new social configurations of global capitalism to a certain form of embodied self, dependent upon biotechnologies and tuned to consumer’s culture. Nevertheless, ethnographies of specific sub-cultural realities may reveal alternative embodied subjectivities. Outside China and Chinese diasporic communities, urban multicultural global subjects have been approaching the universe of Taoist bodily practices and life style. In this article I suggest that Taoist tradition, in contexts of cultural transplant, has the potential to face the existential dilemmas characteristic of the social experience of those most affected by contemporary social and cultural transformations in globalized settings. By offering an aesthetic of existence, Taoism becomes another route for the production of embodied selves, which is an alternative to biotechnological consumer’s bodies. I base my analyses on the ethnography of a Taoist community in Brazil.